Capital punishment debate: Staring death in the face

The Call to Service award came with a letter from George W Bush praising him for demonstrating "the outstanding character of America", the consequence of years of activism by Williams to stop young people following the self-destructive path he did in the badlands of south central Los Angeles, where he was a founding member of the Crips in the early 1970s.

But his week Williams got a startlingly different piece of news. A Superior Court judge in Los Angeles told him his execution date had been set for 13 December after the exhaustion of the last of his appeals.

Bizarrely, Judge William Pounders made it almost seem as though he was doing Williams a favour. "This case has taken over 24 years to get to this point," he told the court. "That is a long delay in itself and I would hate to add to that."

Such are the ironies of a case that seems destined to stir up an extraordinary clamour among death penalty activists - pro and anti - over the next few weeks and draw in an international cast of characters who will be pleading with California's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to exercise his power of clemency and recognise the value of keeping Williams alive.

The former gang chief is about as close as one can imagine to a poster-child for rehabilitation. Not only has Williams renounced his past and disavowed his reputation, acquired during his teens and twenties, as a muscle-man capable of terrifying all who dared to cross him or his fellow gang members. He has also spent the past decade campaigning actively against gang violence, turning out 10 books directed at children and teenagers that have addressed everything from the grief of losing friends and family members to the privations of his 9ft-by-4ft cell at San Quentin.

He has drawn up a protocol for ending gang warfare that has been applied from New Jersey to Switzerland and South Africa. And he has been nominated multiple times for the Nobel Peace Prize and, rather less probably, the Nobel Prize for Literature. Mario Fehr, among six members of the Swiss parliament who nominated Williams for the Peace Prize in 2000, singled him out for praise for his "extraordinary youth violence prevention and intervention work".

Yet Williams risks falling victim to the casual bureaucratic cruelty of the American criminal justice system. Several appeal courts have agreed he is a ripe candidate for clemency, but they have refused to quash his death sentence themselves on procedural grounds.

Essentially, they have not found sufficient reason to believe Williams when he insists on his innocence in the four murders for which he was convicted in 1981. That is not to say there are not problems with the evidence against Williams, or with the manner in which his original trial was conducted. Several of the witnesses who testified under oath that he had shot dead a convenience store employee and then, 12 days later, gunned down the owners of a south central motel and their daughter have turned out, on close examination, to be problematic. As the federal appeals court noted in 2002, several were informants with "less-than-clean backgrounds and incentives to lie to obtain leniency from the state in either charging or sentencing".

During the trial, the prosecutor, Robert Martin, found reasons to dismiss the only three black members of the jury pool and constructed a closing argument which sounded much like an appeal to racist stereotypes. Mr Martin described Williams, shackled in the defendant's box, as a "Bengal tiger in captivity in a zoo" and said the jury needed to imagine him in his natural "habitat" which was like "going into the back country, into the hinterlands".

In two subsequent cases, Mr Martin was rebuked by the California appeals courts for using race as a criterion in jury selection and had two murder convictions overturned on those grounds. And he came close to suffering the same fate in the Williams case. In February, a federal appeals judge wrote that the jury selection process in his case violated the constitution and the case deserved to be reheard.

But that opinion turned out to be a minority view, because 15 of the 24 judges on the Ninth Circuit appeals court voted to uphold Williams' conviction and sentence. Few things are harder to pull off in the American justice system than to overturn the outcome of a criminal trial, even in a case like this one where the appeals courts understand and broadly accept the argument that Williams is a deserving candidate for clemency.

The question arising from the Tookie Williams case is whether the justice system is even remotely interested in rehabilitation, or whether the death penalty serves a much more elemental and vengeful purpose. The families of the victims have uniformly come out in opposition to clemency for Williams because, for all his apologies about his past life, he has neither acknowledged his role in the murders nor expressed remorse for them. (They do not buy the argument that he did not commit them.)

Some of the shriller conservative newspaper columnists and opinion-makers have expressed similar scepticism that a man like Williams can ever really be said to have reformed. "What a swell message for kids," The San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders wrote dismissively when talk of commuting Williams' death sentence bubbled up a few years ago. "You can gun down four people and still turn your life around. Or at least find some suckers who will believe you've changed."

Officials at San Quentin say that over the years, they have found evidence that Williams is still in touch with his old Crips brothers, and argued that gang-members still feel a strong allegiance to him as their leader, whatever he might have said or done.

Reaction to such claims has depended largely on people's preconceived notions about the justice system. Proponents of capital punishment have seized on them as a reason to dismiss all of Williams' good works, and death penalty opponents have both minimised their importance and suggested they are part of a concerted campaign by the state to make sure Williams dies by lethal injection, no matter what.

Williams's early life started down a depressingly familiar path. Born in Louisiana, he was the product of a broken home and found himself exposed and vulnerable when he and his mother moved to Los Angeles. With a friend, Raymond Washington, he formed a gang to protect themselves and the other teenagers in his neighbourhood. Nobody quite knows where the name Crips came from; one theory suggests it was short for "crypt-keepers", another that the gang was originally called the Cribs, in acknowledgement of the founders' tender ages. (They also called themselves the Baby Avenues, in homage to the older Avenue gang whom they revered.)

Williams grew up quickly and developed a reputation as a 300lb bruiser who was not afraid to use his muscles and let his victims know who it was they were dealing with. "When I was working the streets, what he was known for is people didn't mess with him, and if you did mess with him, you know, he was a big man and he'd hurt you," a retired South Central detective, Joe Holmes, said on National Public Radio. "And people were in awe of him. They were scared of him."

Williams himself has acknowledged much the same, realising that his magnetism and brute strength was a major factor behind the Crips spreading throughout Los Angeles and beyond in the years when he ruled the streets. "We morphed into a monster," he said on the same radio programme. "We performed mayhem and aggression throughout the city. We terrorised everybody."

The murders for which he was arrested were committed in 1979, when he was 26, and he was convicted and sentenced to death two years later. His rehabilitation, as he describes it, did not begin until several years later, when he was placed in solitary confinement to ward off fears of gang warfare within San Quentin and he began to think seriously about who he was and what he could do to atone for the damage he had done.

In 1993, he gave an interview to a young writer called Barbara Becnel, who dismissed him at first as an unrepentant thug but came around enough to volunteer her services as his ghost writer. The first in the Tookie Williams Speaks Out Against Gang Violence books appeared shortly afterwards. Williams would draft his words in his cell then communicate them in phone conversations with Becnel, which were limited under prison rules to 15 minutes.

In 1997, Williams issued a formal apology on his website in which he lamented the ruin of many young lives, especially young black lives, caught up in the gang lifestyle and vowed "to spend the rest of my life working toward solutions".

He has been true to that vow. Last year, his peace protocol was responsible for a successful truce between the Crips and their eternal rivals, the Bloods, in Newark, New Jersey, earning the gratitude of city officials who back his clemency request. His website receives a torrent of e-mails from young people who say he turned their lives around, a torrent that turned into a flood last year after the airing of a television movie about his life starring Jamie Foxx.

Governor Schwarzenegger's thoughts on the matter are unknown. He has had two clemency requests in his two years as governor, and refused both. In one he rejected the notion that model behaviour was grounds for clemency. "I expect nothing less," his official statement said. He is expected to receive Williams' request no later than 8 November, leaving just more than a month for what promises to be an intense and emotional battle for one man's life.